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By Jennifer Tisdale

Just last week, The Gernsheim Collection, co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Texas Press, received an Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, which honors a distinguished catalog in the history of art published during the past year.

To celebrate this recognition, the Ransom Center is offering editor-signed copies of The Gernsheim Collection at a reduced price of $60 through March 15. Orders placed by this date will also include a set of five notecards featuring images from the Gernsheim collection.

Edited by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection coincided with the Ransom Center’s 2010 exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection, which explored the history of photography through the Center’s foundational photography collection. The Gernsheim collection is widely considered one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world’s earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.

The book includes more than 125 full-page plates of images from the collection accompanied by descriptions of each image’s place in the evolution of photography and within the collection.

The offer is available online and in person at the visitor’s desk in the Ransom Center’s lobby through Thursday, March 15.

The publication of The Gernsheim Collection was made possible by the generous support of Janet and Jack Roberts, Jeanne and Van Hoisington, Margaret Hight, William Russell Young III, and the Hite Foundation in memory of Sybil E. Hite.

By Alicia Dietrich

A production still of Robert De Niro as Max Cady, the bible verse-tattoo sporting convict from 'Cape Fear.'

“Eat, drink, and be merry.” “The skin of our teeth.” “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Phrases from the King James Bible are so thoroughly integrated into our language that we often don’t think about their origins. In conjunction with today’s opening of the exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, co-Curator Danielle Brune Sigler explores the translation’s influence on works ranging from the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. to Robert De Niro’s tattoos in Cape Fear.

By Alicia Dietrich

A drawing of Halley's Comet by Sir John F. W. Herschel in 1835–1836.

A collection of science materials from the family of Sir John F. W. Herschel (1792–1871) is now open for research after a grant enabled staffers to rehouse the collection and to create an online inventory.

The Herschel family papers, acquired in 1960 with subsequent smaller accessions of additional materials, largely represent the life and work of Herschel, the English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor. John Herschel has been called Britain’s first modern physical scientist, and his correspondence has been noted as one of the most valuable archives for 19th-century science.

The Herschel family papers at the Ransom Center form a significant resource for the study of the history of science in general and also for studies in astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The lives of the Herschels, their ground-breaking achievements, their interactions with other leading scientists of their time, and their influence on their colleagues’ work are topics scholars may pursue in the papers. The Ransom Center’s Herschel collection is exceeded in size only by the collection at the Royal Society in London.

The cataloging project was funded by a $10,000 grant from the Friends of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.

One lucky guest will also win a “King for a Day” prize. At the event, enter to win a stay at the Four Seasons, Austin; a five-course chef’s tasting dinner for two at Wink; gift certificate for movies and refreshments at Violet Crown ($50); four tickets to a Chanticleer choral performance from Texas Performing Arts; four tickets to Sherwood Forest Faire, and a downtown horse-drawn carriage ride compliments of Angeli Carriages

By Kelsey McKinney

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Book Conservator Mary Baughman teaches intern Hsiang-Shun Huang how to build a housing that will keep shelved books safe. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.Sonja Reid, Registrar with the Ransom Center’s exhibition services, adjusts the humidity of the case holding the Gutenberg Bible. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.Ransom Center staff oversee the installation of vinyl text for the exhibition “The King James Bible: Its History and Influence,” which opens Tuesday. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.Linda Hohneke, conservator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, installs an item on loan from the Folger for the exhibition "The King James Bible: Its History and Influence." Photo by Alicia Dietrich.Sonja Reid, registrar with the Ransom Center's exhibition services, and Linda Hohneke, conservator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, install a bible that belonged to Queen Elizabeth I. The item, on loan from the Folger, will be on display when "The King James Bible: Its History and Influence" opens Tuesday. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

By Carolyn Durham

Undated photos of Diane Johnson.

Carolyn A. Durham, Inez K. Gaylord Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the College of Wooster, spent the month of June (2011) at the Harry Ransom Center on a fellowship. Her research in the Diane Johnson collection informs her book, Understanding Diane Johnson, which will be published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2012 as part of a series on “Understanding Contemporary American Literature.”

During the summer of 2011, I had the good fortune to spend a productive and fascinating month in residence at the Harry Ransom Center thanks to a research fellowship funded by the Center’s Filmscript Acquisitions Endowment. The extensive holdings of the Diane Johnson collection, which reflect the remarkable diversity of the novelist’s work in biography, criticism, reviewing, screenwriting, and fiction, allowed me to complete Understanding Diane Johnson, a biographical and critical study that will be published in 2012 by the University of South Carolina Press.

Johnson is always significantly concerned with the shape and form of her fiction, and the Ransom Center holdings allowed me to compare different versions of her manuscripts so that I could better understand her strategies for composition and revision. I was able to see the effect that her work in screenwriting, beginning with the co-writing of The Shining with Stanley Kubrick, had on the drafting of her novels, whose outlines increasingly resemble cinematic storyboarding. I also discovered that she habitually outlined classical novels while she was working on her own. One folder, for example, juxtaposed preliminary plans for The Shadow Knows with several outlines of Jane Austen’s Emma, a fascinating pairing given Johnson’s training as a Victorian scholar. At the same time, the sequences and charts she designed while working on Lying Low confirmed in interesting ways the affinity that she has often expressed for the narrative innovation practiced by the French New Novelists.

Because Johnson writes novels of manners that focus on the concept of America, cultural context is extremely important in the interpretation of her writing, and the Ransom Center’s collection provided me with significant data about what she was thinking and experiencing throughout her life. Johnson’s papers range from elementary school coursework to childhood and adolescent diaries to college and graduate school papers and lecture notes from her 20-year career as a college professor to such unexpected treasures as a 1968 letter from Hubert Humphrey asking her to reconsider her decision not to vote for him, a letter from Johnson objecting to being overcharged for gas written in the same ironic voice evident in her fiction, and an account of the summer she spent as a Mademoiselle guest editor, made famous by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Even knowing that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique described a climate for women and a concept of marriage reflected in Johnson’s early novels, I had not expected to discover that her correspondence with Alison Lurie, beginning in the late 1950s, provided a remarkably detailed illustration of what Friedan called “the problem that has no name.”

The Ransom Center’s collection also gave me access to a good deal of information that is not available anywhere else, which includes Johnson’s first and only unpublished novel and her unpublished screenplays written for films that were to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, and Wim Wenders. Her correspondence, often with other major writers, revealed the same humor, irony, and sense of satire that informs her novels and gave me important insight into what was on Johnson’s mind while she was drafting her own work.

By Kelsey McKinney

Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, and Anita Desai were selected as finalists for the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Authors Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, and Anita Desai were selected as finalists for the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The Ransom Center holds the archives of Banks, Delillo, and Desai.

Banks was nominated for his twelfth novel Lost Memory of Skin, DeLillo was nominated for his collection of short stories The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, and Desai was nominated for The Artist of Disappearance, a collection of three novellas.

DeLillo was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award in 1991 for his novel Mao II (1991). Banks was previously nominated for Affliction (1990) and Cloudsplitter (1999). This is the first nomination for Desai.

The winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner award will be announced on May 5, 2012.

To celebrate this news, the Ransom Center will give away a signed copy of a Russell Banks book. Email hrcgiveaway@gmail.com with “Banks” in the subject line by midnight CST tonight to be entered in a drawing for the book. [UPDATE: The contest has closed, and the winner has been notified. Congratulations to David J., winner of a signed copy of Affliction by Russell Banks.]

By Danielle Sigler

Teachers attend a workshop about using Watergate materials in their classroom in 2011. Photo by Pete Smith.

In elementary school, my class took a field trip to the main branch of the Houston Public Library. We learned how to use the microfilm machines, and I was allowed to look up the front page of the newspaper from the day I was born. I still remember the “Ransom Recovered” headline, a reference to the Patty Hearst case, something about which I knew absolutely nothing.

That moment sitting in front of a microfilm reader is as vivid to me now as it was 30 years ago. Suddenly, there was an entire world before me. I had discovered the appeal of research and of primary source materials. I certainly wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time. I just knew that I had found something new and interesting that suggested limitless possibility.

That love of research ultimately led me to the Ransom Center. And appreciating the value of using primary source materials in the classroom has inspired the Ransom Center’s teacher workshops.

For the last five years, the Center has offered seminars for teachers on topics ranging from the 1920s to Watergate. These workshops provide the Ransom Center with the opportunity to share collections with educators from around the state who can then take their experiences and digital materials back to the classroom and their students. Local teachers can also follow up by bringing their students to tour the exhibitions.

This spring, the Ransom Center will be hosting two workshops related to the exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The first workshop will examine the historical influence of the King James translation and is designed for social studies teachers at the junior high and high school levels, while the second workshop will focus on the King James Bible’s literary influence and is designed for language arts teachers at the junior high and high school levels.

A grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, made these workshops possible. Thanks to their support, teachers will leave the workshop with a copy of Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611–2011, an edition of the King James Bible, and digital images from the Center’s collections to use in their classrooms.

By supporting the work of local educators, we hope to foster the next generation of scholars and help students understand how vital the care and preservation of our cultural heritage is.

By Kelsey McKinney

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Lindsay Barras, a volunteer in the conservation department, helps construct a “pizza box” to hold an oversized book that is being repaired in the book lab. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.Volunteer Michel McCabe-Hughes organizes slides in the photography collection. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.Graduate intern Arcadia Falcone searches the souvenir program collection for items. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.

By Kelsey McKinney

Samantha Pinto received a research fellowship to work in the Transcription Centre collection.

Georgetown University Assistant Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies Samantha Pinto is a fellow in the African and American Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin for the 2011–2012 year. She writes about her research in the Transcription Centre, an organization founded for African Literature and Culture based in London during the 1960s.

Pinto’s article explains the historical context of the Transcription Centre and the contemporary voices of the time. Her discoveries stem from her thorough examination of the Centre’s radio program “Africa Abroad.”

The Ransom Center annually awards more than 50 fellowships to support scholarly research projects that require on-site use of its collections.